Gen Z ponders future - and finds it at grave risk of climate threat

FOR centuries, the younger generation of the day has been the subject of hand-wringing and lamentation from their seniors, who bemoan how the inheritors of the future are feckless, soft, and generally unprepared for adulthood. Any commentary on millennials or their Generation Z successors, therefore (perhaps including this one) is best taken with a pinch of history-conscious salt.

Nonetheless, today's younger demographics have arguably good reasons for appearing dissolute or inadequately committed to planning for their future: simply because said future faces the genuine existential threat of climate change.

This has perhaps been mostly clearly expressed by Gen Z climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has galvanised an international youth movement of climate strikes. As she put it on Monday to an audience of world leaders at the United Nations Climate Action Summit, which notably failed to deliver urgent climate action: "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."

The current target of halving carbon emissions by 2030 gives the world a mere 50 per cent chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees Celsius rise in temperatures, as Thunberg noted. Nor are the G-20 countries even on track for that. Under current commitments, the world seems set to warm by 3 degrees Celsius or more, a scenario widely described as catastrophic: extreme weather, widespread crop failures, rising sea levels, and so on. With scientists reporting ever-grimmer numbers and wider media coverage raising awareness of the risks, climate change has become impossible to ignore. Western media reports have noted anecdotal increases in "eco-anxiety", which the American Psychological Association defines as "a chronic fear of environmental doom".

Closer to home, at the Singapore Climate Rally on Saturday, the signs held up by young participants included some that read "Studying for a dying future" and "You'll die of old age, I'll die of climate change". Those snappy slogans capture a worryingly defeatist sentiment: if the future is doomed, today's efforts are meaningless. Furthermore, those who call for action on climate change may apparently be relative optimists. Consider, in contrast, the silent climate fatalists who believe that irreversible environmental change is already underway, and thus that there is no point in doing anything.

Millennials have been said to lack foresight, not least in their careers, with a YOLO (you only live once) spirit that focuses on living in the moment rather than planning for the future. Yet it is hard to be future-oriented if one is unconvinced about the prospects for any future at all.

If the climate apocalypse is set to happen within their lifetimes, it is little wonder then that millennials might fail to set long-term career goals, save for retirement, and other responsible actions that are premised upon future stability.

Generation Z (usually defined as those born from the mid-1990s to the early-2000s) are beginning to enter the workforce. If they too seem to suffer from the same lack of drive, older generations could perhaps cut them some slack. The problem is not that the young do not think about the future; it is that they have done so, and find it deeply unpromising.